About the Book

With this unique resource, you'll discover how to unlock the power behind Excel Services in order to effectively utilize server-side spreadsheet calculation and rendering. It walks you through all programming aspects of Excel Services, covering everything from APIs to UDFs (User Defined Functions). You'll quickly gain a strong understanding of what Excel Services is, how to work with it, and how to develop applications using its robust features.

Written by the senior software development engineer for Excel Services, this book first provides you with detailed explanations about the various programmability options Excel Services offers. You'll then gain an inside look into the problematic areas that you must avoid. And you'll find ideas for solutions that you can create using this server technology. This information will help you extend and work against Excel Services as you develop business-critical applications.

What you will learn from this book:

Steps for streamlining work with the Excel Web Services API

In-depth explanations about Excel Services UDFs, including various ways to make them work in Excel 2007

How to use Excel Models to extend your applications

Various techniques used to employ both Excel and Excel Services in end-to-end solutions

How to streamline processes that rely on Excel spreadsheets, such as modeling, handling, and storing data

Tools used for generating Excel workbook-based custom Web services, RSS feeds, and more

Hints for building your own mashups using Excel Services

About the Author

Shahar Prish was born and raised in Israel. He was playing around with computers for 10 years or so when suddenly and unexpectedly it became a useful skill to have. At the age of 16, Shahar started working in a company that did various backup and encryption applications for the PC. When he turned 18 he was drafted to the army where he defended his country from behind a keyboard, a monitor, and way too much non-dairy chocolate bread-spread. When he got out of the army, he tried to get a degree in CS, but failed miserably due to work getting in the way. He worked for a big telecommunication company (where he developed software for international calls fraud detection) and in a small startup (which did something with browsers—it was never really clear). In 1998 he was the first employee in a small company called "Maximal Innovative Intelligence" that developed Business Intelligence software. In 2001 Maximal was purchased by Microsoft and the product it was selling was rebranded and sold as "Microsoft Data Analyzer". From Maximal, eleven employees moved over to the US where they started working in the Office group. A year after moving, Shahar started working with the rest of the team on Excel Services (then called Excel Server). After spending most of his life writing code, Shahar intends to keep doing so until the medics pry the keyboard from his dead hands.